Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar (born 2 September 1938)[1] is an Israeli historian, professor emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[13] He wrote his PhD thesis on medieval history at Yale University, under the supervision of Roberto Sabatino Lopez, submitting his dissertation in 1969.

[1] During 1990–96, Kedar was chair of the Research Students Authority (Section of Humanities, Social Sciences, Law) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[2] During his incumbency he wrote two reports: the first discusses the future of the Humanities in Israel,[2] and the second appraises the historical research in Israeli universities;[18] both were published in 2007.

Kedar's interest in the theoretical aspects of this sub-discipline led him to study outlines for comparative history set forth from the late 19th century onward.

[24] Kedar's first major research, based on his PhD dissertation, was published in 1976 by Yale University Press;[25] an expanded version was translated into Italian.

The idea of insurance arose during this period, the geographical range of activity diminished and, instead of advancing to new regions, commerce was now largely limited to the long-known Mediterranean and Black Seas.

In his first article[29] as well as in the above-mentioned book on the Genoese and Venetian merchants he studied changes in naming fashions through the analysis of long lists of citizens that had been compiled at different dates.

In these studies he exhibits "an ability to change thinking through a rigorous and imaginative treatment of source-material that has often been ignored by others"[31] and to "peel away unfounded assumptions and unwarranted traditions of historical orthodoxy.

His longitudinal examination of the descriptions of the Jerusalem massacre of July 1099, from eyewitness reports down to the present,[33] "sets new standards for the historiographical analysis of individual events during the crusades.

[36] In his book Looking Twice at the Land of Israel: Aerial Photographs of 1917–18 and 1987–91, written in Hebrew and published in 1991,[37] Kedar proposes a new way of looking at the history of the country during the 20th century.

In an age in which the feasibility of an unbiased account has been widely called into question, the photographs may tell a uniquely objective if rudimentary story about a country whose recent past has become so befogged by conflicting, self-righteous and often inflammatory 'narratives'.

Examination of the 1917–18 photographs allowed Kedar also to reassess the crucial Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917, as well as other developments on the Palestine front during World War I.

[45] More recently he co-edited, with Merry Wiesner-Hanks, the volume of The Cambridge World History that deals with the "Middle Millennium", i.e., the period 500–1500 CE.

[53] In 2011, Kedar published, with Peter Herde of Würzburg University, a book that revealed that Karl Bosl, one of Bavaria's most prominent historians in the post-1945 era, had manifold links with the Nazi regime and as late as December 1944 extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler's Reich.

Yet immediately after the war he asserted that he had risked his life in activities against the Nazi regime, and succeeded in persuading a Denazification Tribunal that this had been the case.

[55] In 1977 Kedar proposed to Professor Horst Fuhrmann, the then-president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, to launch a series of critically edited Hebrew texts written in the German lands in medieval times.

In 2009, Kedar and Oleg Grabar (of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) edited a book on the past and the present of Jerusalem's Temple Mount / al-Haram al-Sharif, whose possession has become of the thorniest issues impeding an Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement.